After years of fans calling for it to happen, Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow is finally getting her own solo movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The film has been coming together slowly and we don’t know many firm details about it yet, like the story or the cast beyond Scarlett Johansson. Now it looks like some of the story details will be undergoing a change because the Black Widow movie is reportedly getting a rewrite.
Marvel has hired Ned Benson to rewrite the script for Black Widow, according to Collider’s Jeff Sneider. Ned Benson is best known for The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby trilogy of films, all of which he wrote and directed. Those films follow a married couple over the same time period, with the Him and Her entries offering the perspective of James McAvoy’s Conor and Jessica Chastain’s Eleanor Rigby.
The Her chapter, told from Eleanor's perspective, is considered to be the better of the two, which is encouraging for a writer who is taking on a script with a female lead that will be brought to life by a female director. Apparently Marvel was impressed by Ned Benson’s work on The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby and that helped him to snag the job rewriting Black Widow.
Jac Schaeffer, who worked on the screenplay for the upcoming comedy The Hustle and will be the showrunner on the Vision and Scarlet Witch Disney+ series, wrote the previous draft of the Black Widow script.
Marvel clearly didn’t hate Jac Schaeffer’s work on the first draft of the Black Widow script considering that she will continue to play a big role in Marvel properties. Nevertheless, it sounds like for whatever reason, Marvel thought that the Black Widow script needed some punching up and brought Ned Benson in to do it.
Marvel obviously does everything it can to make every movie great, but it does seem to be taking a little extra care with Black Widow. The studio met with over 70 filmmakers before Cate Shortland gave her winning pitch. Having someone come in and do a rewrite on the script is normal and just shows Marvel wants the best possible script to work off of to get this movie right.
To that end, Marvel has also recently added Star Wars: Episode IX and Avengers: Infinity War art director Jim Barr to do the same job for Black Widow. We also recently got confirmation from Kevin Feige that the Black Widow movie will not be rated R as had been rumored. We are still in the dark about the plot, but the movie is reportedly set before the events of 2012’s The Avengers.
Black Widow does not yet have a release date, but it could be one of Marvel’s mysterious 2020 films. That said, we don’t have to wait that long to see Scarlett Johansson back in action in the MCU. She returns in Avengers: Endgame, in theaters on April 26. Check out our release schedule to keep track of all of this year’s biggest movies.
